The no-nonsense way to accelerate your business with containers

This white paper explains why containers are so popular and how to leverage them in your organisation. Learn the benefits of process containers and machine containers. Deep-dive into the two main software tools, Docker and LXD, that are used to manipulate containers.

Why use LXD?

LXD takes the speed and latency of containers and brings them to the hypervisor world. A LXD container gives you full ‘machine’ system functionality, not just a single process. You can run Docker and RunC inside LXD to mix container types. But mostly, LXD is a “really fast hypervisor” that lets you operate exactly the way you currently operate, only at container speeds. You also get:

Bare-metal performance for guests

Easy sharing of hardware resources

Easy monitoring of guest processes

Very precise quality-of-service and quotas

Snapshots

Support for ARM, POWER, X86 and Z

RESTful API and simple CLI

Rapid provisioning, instant guest boot

Remote image services

Secure by default, with AppArmor, user namespaces, SECCOMP

Extensible storage and networking

Performance and concurrency from Golang

Supported guest operating systems

Your first step to containers is easy

LXD containers are just like traditional physical and virtual machines. You can log in remotely, manage the guest OS the standard way, install applications, secure them, and operate them with the same tools, but gain the raw performance and density of containers. LXD guests launch in seconds and you can run hundreds on a single server. Connect them separately and securely to networks, copy between hosts and drive all of this through a clean REST API.

Like a virtual machine, only faster

LXD is the next‐generation hypervisor for Linux at scale. LXD is designed to “lift and shift” Linux VMs to containers without modifying the app or operations. Nearly all applications can be installed in LXD containers with no need to touch the application to make it run because LXD’s machine containers operate just like VMs.

LXD is in use at

Getting started with LXD

1
Activate LXD(on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS or greater)

You can generally hit Enter to accept the default answers to the questions, and once you’re setup you can start to launch machines.

2
Create your first container

This will fetch the base Ubuntu guest OS, then launch an instance of that called ’first-machine’

3
See your machine running

4
Jump into that container

Type ‘exit’ to quit the container and return to your host. Launch more containers and see how quickly they start. Install SSH and log into them remotely, they behave just like real machines.

Is LXD a real Linux hypervisor?

Yes: LXD containers give you the experience of virtual machines with the security of a hypervisor, but much, much faster. Without all the overhead, you get the full performance of your host environment. On bare metal, LXD containers are as fast as the native OS. In the cloud, you get subdivider machines without subpar performance.

You can live-migrate LXD containers from machine to machine. We’re working with silicon companies to ensure hardware-assisted security and isolation for containers, like virtual machines. Additionally, you can bind storage or network interfaces to the containers, just like virtual machines.

Ultra-fast OpenStack with LXD

The combination of LXD and OpenStack makes for a very happy system administrator in a Linux-oriented private cloud. All the agility of OpenStack, all the performance of your metal with no virt overhead.

The nova-lxd driver allows OpenStack instances to be scheduled as Linux containers. Images are booted from OpenStack’s image service, Glance, and instances communicate over Neutron’s networking functionality just like KVM based VMs.

How does our LXD support offering work?

Enterprise support for LXD is provided by Canonical through Ubuntu Advantage.

We also offer consulting services and customisation for larger organisations to integrate LXD with existing infrastructure.

To discuss your requirement connect with a member of the Canonical team.